My prose fiction narrative having been rejected from where I had sent it, and it being based on the idea of stories which are told or, importantly, not told, I decided it might need revision. It is under the influence of these so-called neo-baroque Latin American writers I read, and it may be entirely too involved and oblique for English language readers. So I decided to look for other prose narratives which are stories about or centering upon untold stories, and came by chance upon an actual memoir: Mihai Grünfeld’s Leaving: Memories of Romania.
The material is of course fascinating since the story is about growing up in Romania in the fifties and sixties. Grünfeld’s parents were both Holocaust survivors whose families, including his father’s first set of children, born before the war, perished. They decided to create a new family and not talk about the past, in part as an effort to let the new children grow up unburdened. The family atmosphere was haunted nonetheless. Eventually the children slip out of Romania, but the story ends there. The book’s effort is to evoke the time before leaving; in that time, the children were curious about their parents.
They ask their parents about the camps but do not appear to have asked a great deal about life before that, evidently because this would have meant asking their parents to dwell on memories of those who died and the world that was lost. (Romania’s World War II history is particularly tragic.) Beyond the story it tells, I enjoyed the focus in this text on daily life and popular culture at the time, from the point of view of a child and youth, just in the process of discovering the world. Much happens at the level of the senses, much is intuited; much is understood but not everything is explained. There is a great deal of thick, implicit context, and then there are gaps in that context. This is the point.
It was interesting to read this after seeing Tree of Life, whose narrator also looks back in fragmented images to the ways he came to know the world when young. “There are very few films I can think of that convey the changing interior weather of a child’s mind with such fidelity and sensitivity,” says the NYT review. “Nor are there many that penetrate so deeply into the currents of feeling that bind and separate the members of a family. So much is conveyed … but without any of the usual architecture of dramatic exposition. One shot flows into another, whispered voice-over displaces dialogue…”. Grünfeld’s memoir is not as audacious as this formally, but the representation of consciousness in it moves in that direction.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 